Redrawing French Empire Comics

Redrawing French Empire in Comics by Mark McKinney investigates how comics have represented the colonization and liberation of Algeria and Indochina. It focuses on the conquest and colonization of Algeria (from 1830), the French war in Indochina (1946–1954), and the Algerian War (1954–1962). Imperialism and colonialism already featured prominently in nineteenth-century French-language comics and cartoons by Töpffer, Cham, and Petit. As society has evolved, so has the popular representation of those historical forces. French torture of Algerians during the Algerian War, once taboo, now features prominently in comics, especially since 2000, when debate on the subject was reignited in the media and the courts. The increasingly explicit and spectacular treatment in comics of the more violent and lurid aspects of colonial history and ideology is partly due to the post-1968 growth of an adult comics production and market. For example, the appearance of erotic and exotic, feminized images of Indochina in French comics in the 1980s indicated that colonial nostalgia for French Indochina had become fashionable in popular culture. Redrawing French Empire in Comics shows how contemporary cartoonists such as Alagbé, Baloup, Boudjellal, Ferrandez, and Sfar have staked out different, sometimes conflicting, positions on French colonial history.

Title Page, Copyright

Contents

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

I thank my colleagues at Miami University, who have been extremely supportive
of my research over the years: Jonathan Strauss, Chair of French
and Italian; my other departmental colleagues, who have heard and commented
on my presentations of this material in our Irvin works-in-progress
series (2000, 2009); ...

Chapter 1. Redrawing French Empire in Comics: An Introduction

How do French cartoonists redraw French empire in comics? In what ways
do they represent its consequences today? In Jambon-Beur: Les couples
mixtes [Ham-Butter/Arab1: Mixed Couples] (1995), by Farid Boudjellal, the
painful burden of colonial history has a devastating impact on Charlotte-Badia, ...

Chapter 2. Redrawing Colonial Algeria

Given the importance of colonial memory to contemporary French politics
and national identity (Silverman 1992; Stora 1992), Pierre Nora’s editorial
decision to more or less neglect colonial sites in his otherwise rich, monumental
edited work, Les lieux de mémoire [Places of Memory] (1984–92),
surprised many people. ...

Chapter 3. The Fall of French Indochina

After the loss of an imperial territory, one way of regaining access to it is
vicariously through representation, by redrawing empire and retelling its
myths. It may, for example, be conjured up by a nostalgic colonialist storyteller,
as is the case for the reader-viewer and the fictional characters in
Trafic en Indochine [Trafficking in Indochina], ...

Chapter 4. The Algerian War and its Aftermath

As one of the most violent and protracted decolonization conflicts, the
Algerian War would seem to offer a rich subject matter for comic books.
However, writing in 1990, Kacem Basfao observes that the preceding colonial
period—stretching from France’s initial invasion of Algeria in 1830
until the outbreak of the war on 1 November 1954 ...

Chapter 5. The Voyage Out and the Voyage In

What is “the meaning of the colonial voyage” (Memmi 1985: 33) today?
The “voyage out”—to colonize, survey or draw empire, for example—is a
corollary to what Edward Said (1994b) calls the “voyage in.”1 I use these
two tropes here to summarize some of the most important transformations
in comics about French colonialism and imperialism. ...

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